<<< Meet Teagen - and friend - looking dangerously like an interracial couple. Jesus H. Christ, somebody do something! Teagan gets top marks from me, just for having no tattoos. More mannequins later...

||| Welcome to the very last edition of the ka-os|theory news compendium.

For the past two and a half years, I've been "curating" the best - and worst - of global GBLT and pop culture news. I'm a news junkie, and it seemed like a good way to keep up with what's going on. My friend Trev was working for BBC News at the time, and described working on a "news playlist" TV news picked from. Ah ha, I thought! But it's incredibly time consuming - increasingly so - and sadly I also have a day job to clock in with. So I've decided to do other things (like catch up with those friends who haven't been driven off by a cry of "No, I've got to finish the blog!") and stop the news round-ups for now.

Thanks go to everyone who's spent a minute on these pages, and extra thanks to those who took the time to comment - it means a lot.

I couldn't have done it without the daily, hourly work of sites like Towleroad - and particularly UK Gay News - to name a few, who everyday tirelessly bring us the GBLT news that mainstream outlets ignore. ka-os|theory was never intended to replicate what those sites do; rather, to bring together a balanced, informative, fun, weekly review of stories that reflects the global GBLT experience, regardless of who or where you are.

And then there's Taylor Siluwé. It would be disingenuous to claim I was stopping because Taylor is gone - in fact, I'd planned on wrapping things up with issue 100 some months back - but the fact is his absence has left a huge hole. Taylor was hugely supportive of ka-os|theory from early on; his encouragement, and his approval, was crucial to me. Role model, peer... Call it what you will: what he thought mattered. I have lost a friend, and ka-os|theory has lost a great ally. It just doesn't really feel the same anymore.

||| New York victory: Couple can finally marry after 60 years. (The Independent)

>>> New York victory: Not everyone is celebrating, however. Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, fears the law will "lead to polygamy, infidelity, and 'the churches, and believers' being 'hauled into court for their conviction that marriage is between one man, one woman, forever, bringing children into the world.'" (The New Civil Rights Movement)

<<< New York victory: Bronx GBLT community celebrates big F**K YOU to Sen. Ruben Diaz.

||| New York victory: Victor Hoff at MOC Blog has a different take on things - and a stark warning.

<<< The separation of church and hate, by Rev. Dr. Cindi Love. "For those who insist that we are and must be a Christian Nation, may I suggest that the current 'Kill the Gays' strategy of Engle and his cohorts (sadly, even the Governor of the Great State of Texas) is not only flawed, it is anything but Christ-like." (The Huffington Post)

||| The intensity of whatever opposition remains to marriage equality is rapidly dissipating. (The Washington Post)

||| Bachmann: Homophobe-in-chief? "As she moves from Tea Party fringe to Republican presidential contender, her horrible anti-gay record deserves exposure." (The Guardian)

<<< LZ Granderson: Michele Bachmann? I just don't get it. "We now know that Bachmann's not interested in cleaning up Washington. She wants to baptize it with her theology and half-truths. She wants to get rid of the Environmental Protection Agency [and] rid the country of porn." (CNN)

||| But the Pentagon has now instructed the military "to stop removing personnel who are gay from service and to begin accepting applications from homosexual recruits who are otherwise qualified to serve". (New York Times)

||| Anti-gay black conservative Herman Cain says President Obama is not a "real black man". Most telling is the following statement: "It is documented that his mother was white and his father was from Africa. If he wants to call himself black, fine."

||| An Arkansas newspaper that omitted the name of a gay man's surviving partner from his obituary has apparently gone back on its promise to reprint the obit with the partner's name included. (The Advocate)

<<< Larry King murder trial: Brandon McInerney, who was 14-years-old when he shot King in a classroom, "faces 1st degree murder and hate-crime charges. The defense will argue for voluntary manslaughter, saying he was young, immature and provoked". (Los Angeles Times)

||| Larry King murder trial: Former classmates of the 15-year-old recount details of the morning he was killed and the months leading up to it. (Los Angeles Times)

<<< The Pride Power List 2011: The 100 most influential LGBT people in the UK. ka-os|theory favourite Kele Okereke, but the list is mostly notable for who isn't on it.

||| Former Doctor Who, Queer As Folk writer Russell T Davies has "launched an outspoken attack on [Prime Minister] David Cameron and Nick Clegg", branding the leaders "savage and evil people" and claiming the Conservative Party was "buffoonish" but "lethal as a laser".

||| David Cameron's rhetoric on GBLT equality in Africa could backfire.

>>> And it is just rhetoric. Case in point: Deportation of gay Ugandan - and torture victim - Robert Segwanyi stopped at last moment.

||| Hideously diverse Britain: when liberalism needs to be more muscular. "A man in east London was fined just £100 for putting up stickers proclaiming the area to be a 'gay-free' zone. That doesn't reflect well on anybody involved." (The Guardian)

>>> News of the World: Murdoch's malign influence must die with the News of the World. "The scandal over phone hacking has exposed a rotten empire and the urgent need for stronger press regulation." (The Observer)

<<< Charlie Brooker on the last edition. "Today I bought the News of the World. Having fashioned a disguise from dirt and wool, I cycled to the newsagents at 7.30am. Having secured a copy, I made my excuses and left – after hiding it inside a necro-zoophiliac porn mag, so any passers-by outside wouldn't judge me too harshly."

>>> Iconic homeware chain Habitat collapses into administration; all but three of its London stores are closed. Video. More at The Guardian.

||| The collapse of Habitat: Rise and fall of the empire that shaped Britain's habitat. (The Independent)

||| The collapse of Habitat: "The stores appeared to have been on a life support machine for a number of years, flattened by IKEA and myriad imitators. Habitat... somehow became caught in its own time warp." (The Observer)

||| But the country's gay rights progress also highlights deep division; there were 260 murders of gays, lesbians or transvestites in Brazil last year, and around 65 killings so far this year. This is 14-year-old Alexandre Ivo, who was beaten and strangled to death by skinheads - who suspected him of being gay - in Rio de Janeiro. (BBC News)

||| And the Christian right want a "Heterosexual Pride" day, or "Orgulho Hetero" in Portuguese.

||| BRAZIL: Watch out Sao Paulo - Rio de Janeiro aims to become world capital of gay tourism. "Diversity week follows series of gay-friendly government schemes to capitalise on growing market." (The Guardian)

||| CUBA: Is this Cuba's Stonewall moment? "Last week the streets of Havana witnessed their first ever gay pride march. Gianluca Mezzofiore talks to those on the front line of the island's equality movement." (The Independent)

<<< NICARAGUA: A tranvestite poses during a gay pride parade in Managua on June 28. (PhotoBlog)

||| JAMAICA: Homeless street youth more tolerant of homosexuality than their counterparts living at home.

>>> UGANDA: "Kill The Gays" bill author David Bahati's star rises in Uganda's ruling party, and is "named chairman of the Ugandan Fellowship, a branch of the US-based secretive group known as the C Street Fellowship or The Family". (Box Turtle Bulletin)

||| ZIMBABWE: A backlog of prisoners is building up on Zimbabwe's death row because the authorities are struggling to recruit a new hangman. (Telegraph)

||| SOUTH AFRICA: Gay refugee programme launched in Cape Town. "The programme will advocate for the rights of LGBT asylum-seekers and refugees, assist with paralegal advice and aims to empower this group by building a support network." (MambaOnline)

<<< Our sexual desires exposed by neuroscientists' porn study. "Straight men are as aroused by penises as homosexuals and have fantasies of their wives sleeping with other men, but any fears about the negative or corrupting influence of pornography are misguided." (Sydney Morning Herald)

<<< But the Family Research Council wants the public to believe children are traumatised by images of loving gay couples, and have issued a DVD to spread the lie.

||| Pleasure Rush, a new project sponsored by Philadelphia's The Gay and Lesbian Latino AIDS Education Initiative (GALAEI), "[seeks to] capture the attention of individuals who are desensitized to current HIV prevention messages that focus solely on getting tested or knowing your status."

||| This is cool. Change trains - whilst they're still in motion. File under: "It's Never Happen." Still, there's a video of the idea here.

PRINT & VISUAL

||| Remembering Taylor Siluwé. Friend and fellow writer Nathan James: "[He] was one of the most beautiful human beings I've ever known. He was one of my best friends, and a gifted writer, as well." (Lambda Literary)

||| ka-os|theory: "To those of you who didn't know him, or hadn't read his blog or his books, or heard his dreams or ambitions, it's hard to desribe him. Razor sharp and one of the smartest people I've been lucky enough to meet, he was sexy (hell, have you seen those lips? They're a work of art!), and ambitious, a dreamer, and brilliant. He had a heart of gold. He was one of us. He was my friend."

||| MOC Blog: "Taylor was one of those people for whom the expression, 'He can disagree with you without being disagreeable' was meant. He will be deeply, deeply missed."

||| Taylor Siluwé: The Food and Drug Administration releases graphic new warnings for cigarette packages. When he announced his illness, Taylor wrote this: "I discovered smoking at the age of 19 because I was on a boring job and wanted to be rebellious. Twenty-four years later, after quitting off and on repeatedly I'd finally managed to do it for good. I was quite proud of myself. Then came the swollen limp glands, the back pain, and the irony."

<<< Review: The Last Deployment: How a Gay, Hammer-Swinging Twentysomething Survived a Year in Iraq, by Bronson Lemer. "Regardless of how you feel about the war, this memoir is well worth reading."

||| Review: A Queer History of the United States, by Michael Bronski. "Bronski appears to assign a 'role' to LGBT people as subversives throughout American history, simply by their existence."

>>> Review: Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing, edited by Lázaro Lima and Felice Picano. "The stories presented in Ambientesare as varied as their authors, but the over-arching theme is one of otherness within our own communities."

||| Review: The VIPs, by Scott Poulson-Bryant. "Is the novel high-art? No. But it stands on its own well-constructed melodramatic merits."

||| Review: Remembrance of Things I Forgot, by Bob Smith. "A delightful, moving portrait of a man who is given the rare opportunity to literally revisit his past, and the novel will likely be considered one of this year's best."

||| Review: The Empty Family, by Colm Tóibín. "A careful, almost classical style that eschews linguistic pyrotechnics in favor of a moment-by-moment accounting of detail and emotion."

||| Review: The Stranger's Child, by Alan Hollinghurst. "He transcends what might have been a purely backward-looking project, a filling in of the gay blanks..." (The Guardian)

||| Alan Hollinghurst: Sex on the brain. "He had trouble publishing his explicit first book, but by 2004 he'd won the Booker prize. Alan Hollinghurst talks about living alone, the allure of the upper classes and why he's not just a gay writer any more." (The Guardian)

<<< This is the nearly complete New York by Frank Gehry, the eighth tallest building in NYC, and the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere. Stunning.

>>> And here's the Tour Végétale de Nantes, by Edouard François, in France. Its facade will be covered by plants adapted to thrive in rocky crevices.

<<< Oh, this is beautiful. The Kanazawa Umimirai Library, by Kazumi Kudo and Hiroshi Horiba/Coelacanth K&H Architects, in Kanazawa, Japan. It's exactly like the interior Doctor Who's TARDIS circa 1981 - and how the ship should have looked in the 21st century. British fail, Japanese triumph.

STAGE

>>> A younger generation reacts to the fear and terror in The Normal Heart.

||| Review: The Temperamentals. "The play, whose three-theatre run finished in Greenwich last week, tells the little-known story of the formation and ultimate decline of the world's first gay rights organisation... Two decades before the 1969 Stonewall riots."

<<< Here's something to have certain separatist bloggers who hate interracial couples foaming at the mouth. It's from new Channel 4 comedy/drama Sirens.

<<< Coronation Street's "gay agenda": Art critic Brian Sewell asks, "What HAVE they done to Corrie? Is it true that the lives of heterosexual Mancunians are haplessly intertwined with transvestites, transsexuals, teenage lesbians and a horde of homosexuals across the age range." (Mail Online)

||| Coronation Street's "gay agenda": Is Manchester the Sodom of the north? "Brian Sewell's anti-gay diatribe shows how little he knows about Coronation Street – or Canal Street, for that matter." (The Guardian)

||| Coronation Street's "gay agenda": Could straights be the real problem? "If there’s one thing I’ve noticed on't cobbles at the moment, it’s the disproportionate amount of heterosexuals there are. We’re overrun with ‘em! They hang around in gangs – sometimes in public places like the Red Rec, The Rovers or on the bench outside Audrey’s Salon, drinking, smoking and fighting!"

<<< Actress Pam St Clement, who has played Pat Evans for more than 25 years, is to leaveEastEnders. (BBC News)

<<< A new series of EastEnders spinoff E20 will go ahead. One of the new actors is Samuell Benta, who readers may remember homophobic rapper with a secret past Switchblade in Hotel Babylon. More E20 pics here.

<<< Openly gay singer Ari Gold told to get to the back of the bus for holding hands with boyfriend.

||| Lady Gaga denies using the GBLT community to sell records. "[It's] one of the most ridiculous statements anyone can make about me as a person," she tells The Advocate. Well gee, I'm convinced.

||| Buju Banton is jailed for 10 years. Banton's "1988 hit Boom Bye Bye appears to incite the burning, shooting in the head and pouring acid over the faces of gay people".

||| Anti-gay hate peddler Capleton - the Jamaican dancehall artist - has had a concert moved out of Toronto following protests from gay equality groups.

>>> Ricky Martin: I hated it when people tried to force me to come out. "The Puerto Rican singer talks about his struggle with his sexuality, his happiness at having finally come out and the 'very erotic' show he is bringing to London." Martin promises "an onstage orgy involving him and his eight dancers". (The Guardian)

||| Meanwhile, the "The Ghost of Justin Bieber's future", Aaron Carter, has "opened his mouth on the face that meth built about his time with Michael Jackson, and what he said made the glass on Detective La Toya's monocle fog up and crack. Daphne Barak from OK! Magazine Australia alleged that Aaron told her the late Michael Jackson fed him wine and cocaine when he was 15. But wait, Aaron tells TMZ that he never claimed that MJ sedated his 15-year-old body with the bad shit and dropped a red wine waterfall down his froat." (Dlisted)

<<< "VADGE is stiiiiiiiiiiilllllllll sucking on the pacifier known as Baby Brahim despite prior reports of her dropping him off at the orphanage," Dlisted reports. And who can blame her?

<<< Rugby star Ugo Monye accuses London police of racial profiling. In fact, what this story is actually about is a rich jerk-off bitching about having to do something he doesn't want/like. As he says, "I'm furious. Wasting my time." Anyway, happy endings for him - the spoiled crybaby had his PR people call the police PR people, who realised what an important celebrity is. Great Britain: It's who you are and how much you've got that counts!

>>> James Ihedigbo strips for Essence.

||| David Oliver takes third 110-metre hurdles title at the USA Outdoor Track & Field Championships.

||| Gay is the new straight. "Straight men are bending the rules of traditional masculinity and metrosexualizing themselves beyond recognition, while the last thing the modern gay man wants is for people to think he looks gay. What is going on here?" (Xtra!)

<<< Global view: A gallery looking at GBLT equality in 42 nations, based on data from the International lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex association. Left, men pose with a gay pride flag during the opening of the gay and lesbian community's summer at a beach on the outskirts of Havana, Cuba, on 14th June 2008.

||| The Rainbow flag: Artist Gilbert Baker of San Francisco was the first to appropriate the rainbow for this purpose in 1978. (New York Times)

||| Chris "LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!" Crocker and his (cute) boyfriend talk PDA. As my friend Oura says, "WTF - they both have the same voice!!!"

||| Ah, what could have been: "I want to start a chain of restaurants for other people like me called Andy-Mats. The restaurant for the lonely person. You get your food and then take your tray into a booth and watch television." Andy Warhol's never-was international chain of fast-food restaurants.

14
comments:

Jai, thank you for 101 excellent newsy updates. I look at Towleroad every day but I've always read your personal selection from start to end with relish, finding myself clicking on just about every link you put into your huge compilations - such a lot of work! I don't blame you for wanting to stop but please don't blame me for hoping you'll start it up again one day. Thank you for all that you've done and continue to do online for us.

Jai, What? But your was the best multicultural and international gay news coverages available on the www - like none other! I'll truly miss it. I must say though, when I visited week after week, I was always AMAZED, literally (and I'm not amazed easily), to see the effort you put into the ka-os|theory news compendium. And even more unbelievable, given your full-time job. Thank you for all your effort over the year. I'm sad to see the end to the new compendium, but I'm sure you're friends will be glad to have you back! Best of Luck.

I can only magnify what Oura and Mile said.. yours was the best by far in terms of showing the breadth and depth of the LGBT experience.. yours was a multicutural view that I never see on the other blogs

Cup - Don't get me started on MiniDisc! I was always a devotee - I've got three MD Walkmans and a stack of discs, although I no longer use them (although only because I only really listen to music whilst Im at the computer.

Definitely superior to MP3s (boo! hiss!)

One of my first blog posts was about the last walkmans released, too...

Well, I'm totally going to miss this feature. But it's totally understandable!But it still sucks...lolRest In Peace News Compendium. :0(Anyway, I have to read the stories so I can complete my final essay...lol

Backwards and working my way up...1.) I'll never go to a feminist wedding! Oh the horror (::looking at that poosay lip dress::)!2.) What I find so saddening about Chris Crocker is that he's yet another gay "celebrity" that had to turn to porn. I genuinely thought he could make it as a personality in the mainstream. In addition I found this video to be grating and obnoxious. Easily one of his worst. Very pointless...3.) Words gay boys should stop using? There goes half of my vocabulary! #JUST SAYIN4.) Cute, I earned my gay card. But they said I had to work it a teensy bit harder...that could be taken a multitude of ways.5.) The internet killed the gay bar.6.) Gay maybe the new straight but I know a sister when I see "her".7.) I'm sure Tyree's delusional ass thinks it is a compliment that he has the support of the KKK. Loser.8.) Matthew Rush is HOT no matter WHAT...whether he is some twinkie jock or a BUTCH THUG! lol9.) Joe Manganiello! EEEK! I need a pet werewolf. He is a GOD.10.) I am so GLAD they are ending True Blood at season five. If this season is any indication it is for the best. 11.) I skipped a lot of stuff just to talk about Taylor Siluwe. I miss him a lot. As I've always maintained he was one of my number one supporters. He told me he liked my writing (which was cool given that he is a published story writer) and gave me tips on making my blog more successful (which really did help)...and about ten months ago he became like an online older brother to me. We started corresponding by E-mail and the occasional IM chat. At the time I was a mess and Taylor was one of the first people to reach out to me. He was smart, funny, clever, and I miss him. My only regret in life will be not getting the opportunity to really know him in person. I felt like we were forging a friendship. Well, I'm just glad to have known him in some capacity. The blog world is better because he was in it.12.) Phooey, I'm just sad the news compendium is gone! ::CRIES:: lolCheers!

I am so going to miss this monthly round up. It's a lifeline and one of the best ways to navigate through the complexities, frustrations and sheer joy of GBLT culture. Thank you for taking the time and the care to put these together.

And you've been kind enough to link through to many Doctor Who reviews and other related coverage on my own blog. For that, I thank you and for your kind comments on my own blog.

I can understand why you feel it is time to stop. The loss of someone special often calls for a re-evaluation. I'm having similar thoughts, as many writers do I assume, as to when is the appropriate time to shut up shop and have a socal life again.

Good luck to you and whatever else you continue to do. Please keep posting as and when you can.

"I would also like to take this opportunity to squash the persistent rumours about mysterious 'disappearances' and emphasize that rural and urban areas are now enjoying a life of harmony and peace. I'm sure you're glad to hear this. And I'm happy you're glad."